


Something Like Recovery

by Argenteus_Draco



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: Barnes Family, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Bucky deserves something good for a change, Childhood Memories, Gen, buckynat - Freeform, winterwidow - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-15
Updated: 2016-06-15
Packaged: 2018-07-15 06:28:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7211654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Argenteus_Draco/pseuds/Argenteus_Draco
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For five months, Bucky keeps track of the scattered remnants of his life in a collection of notebooks. By the end of that time, he hadn't thought there was anything left to remember.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Something Like Recovery

The notebooks help, but not enough.

They’re scattered throughout the little Brooklyn brownstone apartment he shares with Steve, partly so that if something comes back to him suddenly he can simply grab the nearest one and scribble it down before he forgets it again, and partly because he knows that his best friend hates it when things are left unorganized. He once tried to go through them, catalog them, see if he could put them in some kind of order, and Bucky had come into the living room at 2:00 in the morning to find Steve still at the desk, steaming mug of black coffee in front of him, growling with frustration. Bucky watches him for a minute, wondering if it was the timeline that was giving Steve so much trouble, or the shorthand he’d developed.

“Welcome to my world,” he says dryly, and Steve turns around so sharply that Bucky is surprised he doesn’t knock over the haphazard pile of notebooks and loose papers in the corner. He motions for the open one Steve had been squinting at. “Let me see.”

Steve hands him the book. It’s open to an entry that’s written in Russian characters. He laughs. Steve, apparently, does not find it quite so funny.

“I can’t help when you do things like this, Buck!”

“You can’t help with any of this.” He tosses the book onto the chair behind him and adds, “Especially not when you’re sleep deprived. Go to bed, Steve.”

He doesn’t mention that thanks to the serum, neither one of them is really capable of being sleep deprived, or the fact that he hasn’t slept more than a few hours over the last few days himself, because he keeps waking up from dreams where he’s sweating in the desert heat of Iran, or laying flat on his stomach on a brick rooftop, the better to peer down the scope of his sniper rifle, or being pressed down into one of the thin mattresses of the KGB barracks…

He scrambles for the journal he just tossed away and then reaches over his dumbfounded friend to grab a pen off the desk.

“What?” Steve asks, even while he tries to peer around his shoulder to see what he’s writing. “What did you rememb— Oh, for the love of God, Bucky, I just told you I can’t read that!”

Bucky grins to himself. This isn’t a memory to be shared with Steve. It would probably only make him stammer and blush.

But he can’t wait to remind Natalia.

 

…

 

He knows that what bothers Steve the most is that, while he’s slowly recovering his memories of his time as The Winter Soldier, he still has next to no recollection of his life before that.

“We’ve been over this,” he says, for what feels like (and very well might be) the hundredth time since they unfroze him again. “My name is James Buchanan Barnes. You always called me Bucky, for reasons that neither of us remember because we were kids at the time and it doesn’t matter. My birthday is March 10th. We went to George Washington High School until 1936 and then I went into the army in 1942. I was taken prisoner at Azzano in October 1943, and you were kind and noble enough to come rescue me in November.” He could go on to the important dates from their Howling Commandos days, but he can see from Steve’s expression that he’s had enough, too. “There’s nothing else to remember.”

“Knowing it because someone built a museum about me and remembering it yourself are two different things, Buck.” 

He looks so sad whenever they have this conversation, and that’s why Bucky always relents, and lets him try again. So they sit there at the kitchen table, Steve talks, and Bucky methodically shreds the half of a bagel in front of him instead of eating it. He tries not to let his mind wander, but it’s like listening to someone else’s history, and it’s boring; there’s no recollection, unless it’s somewhere they’ve been since they came back to New York, in which case he can picture the place, but not as it was in the 30s.

The door opens downstairs, and there are footsteps on the landing. It could be any of the Avengers team, they all have keys because Steve is just trusting like that, but it’s most likely either Natalia or Sam. Bucky hopes it isn’t the latter.

It’s both of them.

“Don’t let us interrupt,” Natalia says with a smirk, going straight past him to the cabinets on the opposite side of the room. He resists the urge to turn around and glare at her as she helps herself to tea. Sam pulls out the third seat at their table and sits down, purposefully not looking at the open notebooks. Natalia isn’t quite so courteous of his privacy; but then, they share more of the history that’s contained in them. She puts the water on the stove to boil and comes over to stand behind him, wrapping her arms around his shoulders as she leans forward to see what’s been written. “Making any more breakthroughs?”

“No,” Bucky says, perhaps a little more sharply than he should have, and promptly wishes that he could take back that one simple word, because Steve gets that kicked-puppy look in his eyes again and even Natalia looks like she feels a little sorry for him. He sighs. “We were talking about school. Steve liked art. I was good at math.” He still doesn’t remember being good at math, except where it mattered to calculating the angle of a long-range shot, and he knew that wasn’t something he’d learned in a stuffy, overheated New York classroom.

He jerks upright suddenly as something comes to him, knocking the top of his head against Natalia’s jaw hard enough that she draws back with an indignant huff but but he barely notices. “We took a train to get up to Manhattan. It was crowded because we went at the same time as the factory shifts and it always smelled like sweat and piss and you—” he points an accusing finger across the table at Steve “—you would always get sick. Every morning, between 79th and 110th, like clockwork. I carried crackers in my book bag for you.”

Sam howls with laughter, no doubt trying to picture Captain America getting sick in a subway car, Nat leans over him again and presses a kiss to his forehead and whispers, “Knew it would start coming back to you someday,” and he doesn’t care about any of it because Steve looks so shocked before he starts grinning like an idiot, and Bucky’s very, very proud of himself for getting that kind of reaction out of his far-too-stoic-these-days friend.

 

…

 

It’s all much easier after that.

Summer becomes fall. By September, his memories of Natalia have practically all caught up to her memories of him, and they are able to better fill in the blank spaces that the other still has. Much to Steve’s chagrin (he keeps joking about how he’d hoped Bucky would settle down with a “nice girl” once he’d recovered) she all but moves into their apartment. He can talk as easily with her as he can with Steve about their old life, reminisce fondly about the places they used to frequent, complain about the fact that a soda now costs four dollars instead of five cents.

By October, he’s able to shift his focus from figuring out who he was before 1945 to figuring out who he’s going to become in 2016. He still doesn’t go out on his own much, and when he does it’s usually only as far as the local branch of the public library. He brings back piles of books, histories and novels and poetry and DIY, anything to help him understand the 21st century better. Natalia gets them a computer, a sleek silver thing that matches his arm, and even puts a damn red star over the logo on the cover, but he never really takes to the technology. They indulge in day-long movie marathons to catch up on American popular culture, and for a change it’s a good thing that he and Steve barely need to sleep.

In November the powers that be send Natasha and Steve away on a mission. They come home two weeks later to find that Bucky has adopted a pair of dogs: a goofy, attention-seeking, yellow labrador mix puppy that he insists he couldn’t leave at the shelter because he reminded Bucky too much of Steve, and a wiry-haired mutt with three legs who needs no explanation. The puppy runs excited circles around the newcomers and barks loudly and happily. The mutt merely sniffs each of them once, and wastes no time in jumping onto the nearest chair so that he can lick Natalia’s face.

“Sorry,” Bucky says, without sounding sorry about the situation at all. Then, to the dog as he pulls him back down to the floor: “Hey, Steve doesn’t like it when we greet her like that.”

Natalia raises an eyebrow at him, and the corners of her lips turn upward in a coy grin. “No one to remind you of me?” she asks, while Steve’s ears turn red and he busies himself trying to get a hold on the puppy. 

“Are you jealous?” Bucky asks in reply.

“A little,” she admits, bending down to scratch the mutt’s ear. “I like dogs.”

The next day, Bucky goes out to return his library books and comes home with a haughty, green eyed ginger cat perched on his shoulders. Steve immediately names it Dot.

 

…

 

By December, Bucky’s feeling good enough to invite himself along to Stark’s annual Christmas party. It’s the sort of big, gaudy affair that the billionaire playboy is famous for, not unlike the kinds of parties his father had thrown, except Howard Stark had at least had better taste in music.

Natalia joins him on the balcony overlooking the floor. “Care to dance, Soldier?”

Bucky listens to the rhythmic pounding of the bass — it’s not really all that loud, but with his enhanced senses he can feel it as much as hear it — and makes a face as he gestures to the mostly electronic band. “This is not music,” he says, “and whatever those people are doing down there, it’s not dancing.” In fact, most of them are just standing around, so he isn’t really sure why Stark needed a live band instead of using his impressive array of technology to play pre-recorded music. He and Banner could have spent some time attempting to hack that, put on some swing or some waltzes or maybe some country just because he knows Tony hates it. He turns around, leaning back against the railing so that he can face her. “Sometimes I do wish there were still proper dance halls I could take you to.”

“I think I’d enjoy that.” Her tone is soft and sultry, a little bit teasing, and he wants to sweep her into his arms and take her somewhere more private to _dance_ right then, but she puts a hand against his chest, pushing him gently away. “We’ve still got appearances to make, though. Word spreads fast. Everyone’s curious and very interested to meet the Winter Soldier.”

“Maybe just a little too much,” Bucky mutters. She doesn’t argue him, just links her arm through his and walks with him back into the crowd. It’s surprisingly easy to slip into that persona now, to be Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes again, to sip his drink, compliment the other men and flirt with the women even though he knows he has the prettiest dame in the room on his arm, but anyone would only be able to stand so much empty talk and Bucky isn’t just anyone anymore. He doesn’t really understand what they all want to talk to him for anyway — he isn’t one of their heroes — until someone introduces him to his trophy wife as “the man who pulled Captain America out of the Potomac.” Well, it’s better than some ways he could be known.

Eventually, he gives Natalia’s hand a gentle squeeze with his metal fingers, which she correctly interprets as a signal to make their excuses and disappear. They slip away back up the small spiral staircase, and that’s when he learns that the other Avengers, even Stark, have all escaped hours ago. Steve salutes them as they rejoin the others.

“Thanks for covering our retreat.”

“Anything for you, pal.”

“I was talking to Natasha.” Steve flashes him the winning smile he perfected during his pre-army days, and Bucky makes a rude hand gesture in reply. “It was her turn. If she roped you into helping that’s your fault.”

“Of course,” Clint adds, “as the newest member, it’ll be your turn next.” 

He says it lightly, but it’s such a loaded statement that Bucky doesn’t even know how to touch it, so he just shrugs it off, turns to Natalia, and says, “I guess I’ll have to figure out some way to convince you to return the favor then.”

 

…

 

They don’t go back to Brooklyn; everyone else is staying in the Tower, and even though they’re only half an hour from the comfort and privacy of their own home, it feels nice to be out, to be normal, or as close to normal as anyone on The Avengers will ever come. So nice, in fact, that when they finally leave the next afternoon after a late breakfast with the others, he suggests they take a walk through Central Park before heading back into Brooklyn. It’s four days before Christmas, and it snowed overnight. For all that the city has grown and evolved as surely as its people over the last seventy years, the park could be the same as it was when he was a kid — except that now it’s scattered with warning signs, which seems like a shame to Bucky.

“We used to skate there,” he says, wrapping his peacoat around Natalia’s shoulders as they walk past the pond. She hadn’t come with one the night before, and it isn’t cold enough for him to need it. “I understand the need for safety and all, but we could tell when it was frozen enough to take weight, I’m sure kids today still could.”

And indeed, a lot of kids aren’t deterred by the colorful warnings that have been posted. They giggle to each other as they dart onto and across the ice, daring one another to go out just a little further. Another group has started a snowball fight on the other side of the pond; he remembers doing that with Steve when they were younger too. His friend hadn’t had much of an arm back then, or very good aim, so he’d let Steve and Rebecca gang up on him—

“—whole separate rink for it now,” Steve is saying. “Which is nice, I guess, you can skate whenever you want without waiting for it to… Bucky?” He suddenly notices that Bucky has stopped walking, at the same time that Bucky doubles over and throws up everything in his stomach.

“Bucky!”

He hadn’t thought there was anything left to remember.

Natalia is at his side, holding his hair back for him. Steve is in front of him, on his knees in the snow, peering worriedly back into his face when Bucky looks up again.

“Bucky…”

“I have a sister.” He heaves again, and of all things worries about the fact that he’s just been sick all over Steve instead of the other way around. “I have a little sister.” Rebecca had been ten years his junior, but it hadn’t mattered, he had adored her, and she had idolized him and Steve. He remembers carrying her on his shoulders around Coney Island, braiding her hair with ribbon, buying her penny candy. She liked caramels. 

“And two little brothers,” Steve says gently. He scoops some clean snow up and offers it to Bucky to rinse his mouth out, who almost laughs as he takes it.

“George and Henry,” he says when he’s done. Now that he has Rebecca’s name, the other two are right there behind it, bright and clear as the winter sunlight on the snow. “Since when do you take care of me, Stevie?”

“Since you started to need it.”

Bucky is silent to that. He takes several deep breathes, trying to get his body to stop shaking, and finally asks Steve, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Steve at least has the good grace to look guilty. “Because… Bucky, I’m sorry, but… it’s been seventy years. They’re probably all gone.”

He starts shaking again. Steve had been as close to him as another brother, but how could he have forgotten that he had actual family? Family he could have started looking for two years ago. Family he could have apologized to. 

He feels Natalia shift until she is kneeling next to him and Steve. She puts her hands on either side of his face, cupping his jaw, and waits for him to meet her gaze.

“Do you want to try to find them?”

Slowly, hesitantly, Bucky nods.

 

…

 

Henry followed Bucky into the army. Natalia finds him on an army database that Steve has access to. It lists him as a pilot, shot down over Korea.

George followed their father. Bucky spends eight hours pouring over microfiche and learns that he was killed in a bar fight in 1956. He has a copy of the page made, and then gets back to work.

Steve finds him there an hour before the library is supposed to close. He doesn’t say anything at first, doesn’t try to offer condolences for the news he’s already found, just asks quietly, “Why are you searching obituaries?”

Bucky twists around to give his friend an incredulous look.

“No, I’m serious. You’re still looking for Rebecca, right? Look for wedding announcements.” He hesitates, then asks, “I don’t suppose you’d want to take a break for dinner, though? Pick up again tomorrow morning?”

In answer, Bucky resets the machine. Steve sighs and takes up a post at the neighboring microfiche and starts searching another paper. At 7:30 an attendant comes to tell them they’ll be closing in half an hour, and she comes back at 7:45 and again at 7:50. When she comes in a fourth time at 7:58, Steve gets up and tries to intercept her, charm her, Bucky isn’t really sure and doesn’t really care. He gives an excited whoop, making Steve and the librarian jump.

“Two minutes,” Bucky says, the first thing he’s said to anyone all day. “Two minutes, I just need this. Just this.” He doesn’t even need the printout, he supposes, he just needs a bit of paper—

And his backpack — which he's only carrying out of habit now, he hasn't touched the contents in weeks — is still full of notebooks.

Back in the brownstone, he makes a beeline for the desk where Natalia is set up with the computer.

“Change your search,” he says quickly. “We’re looking for a Rebecca Proctor.”

“I know,” she says, turning around to meet him. “Steve texted me. Proud of you, by the way.” Steve rolls his eyes and throws himself into an armchair while Natalia turns back to Bucky. “I already found her.”

 

…

 

She retired to a little town in the foothills of the North Carolina Appalachians. The yard is a little overgrown, but in a way that’s charming, not disheveled. Steve walks up the gravel drive while Natalia and Bucky wait in the car. He’ll still be able to hear them, and thanks to a clever little device that sits in her ear and a microphone hidden underneath Steve’s shirt, so can Natalia. 

“She became a nurse,” Natalia tells him, flipping through the file they’d received that morning. Bucky nods. 

“Like Steve’s mom,” he tells her. 

She’d graduated Hunter-Bellevue College in 1949, the same year they had woken him up for the first time. She’d worked in maternity wards around Brooklyn and Manhattan most of her career, until she’d gone to a teaching hospital in Baltimore. By all accounts, between mothers and infants, she’d saved over 150 lives, more than three times the number that he had taken, and he is so, so proud of her for that.

The girl who answers the door, though, cannot possibly be his sister, because she looks just like Bucky remembers Rebecca looking in 1942. She’s maybe fourteen, and she has to crane her neck to look up at Steve.

“Hullo,” she says. “Can I help you?”

“I hope so.” Steve takes a piece of paper out of his pocket and starts to unfold it. “I’m looking for—”

Before he can finish, another, smaller girl appears behind the first, looks at Steve, and makes a high pitched squeal that Bucky hopes is delight and not terror. “Captain America!”

“Do I know you?” Steve asks. He’s a lot better with children than, well, anyone else Bucky knows, really.

“No,” she answers, “but I know you! You’re in the newspapers!” She mimes taking pictures. The teenager puts a hand on the younger girl’s shoulder.

“Becca wants to be reporter,” she explains.

“Nanna knows you, too!” the girl called Becca adds.

Steve smiles down at her. “That’s what I’m here about, actually. I… have a Christmas present for her.”

“I’ll tell mom.” The older girl turns back into the house, leaving Steve on the porch with his adoring fan. 

“I guess that’s our cue,” Natalia says. She clicks off her earpiece and gets out of the car, and Bucky does the same after a brief hesitation. 

Two more women come to the door. The first is blond like the two girls, and she smiles at Steve with recognition but not memory. The second is shorter, and white-haired, and has to stand on her tip-toes to hug him.

“You don’t look any different than the last time I saw you,” she says fondly. He chuckles. 

“I’m pretty sure I was shorter, Rebecca,” he chides. “Or you were.”

“I may have only been in high school, but I used to go see your shows. Any time you were in New York. I don’t suppose you remember any of the old songs, do you?” 

Steve makes a face. “I try not to, actually.”

Rebecca laughs, and goes to hug him again. “Well, I suppose that’s your right. Oh, but it is good to see you again, Steve. What a lovely Christmas gift.”

“Actually,” Steve pauses and steps just slightly to the side, revealing Bucky and Natalia as they come up the drive, “I’m not the present.”

Rebecca looks at him for a moment, plainly confused, and then around him, and draws in a surprised little gasp.

“James?” she whispers, disbelieving, and then, as he gets closer to her: “ _Bucky?_ ” She reaches out to touch him, going (fortunately) for his flesh-and-bone arm. She looks between him and Steve, and for all that he’s gotten better at recognizing emotions, Bucky can’t tell whether she’s going to laugh or cry. “God,” she says eventually, “they did it to you, too?”

He nods. It’s more complicated than that, of course, but she doesn’t need to know that right now.

Before he can say anything further, Rebecca grabs him in a fierce hug, and he wonders whether there isn’t some trace amount of serum in her, too; there’s strength in her grip, she doesn’t feel like the 89 year old grandmother he now knows her to be.

“It’s not fair,” she mutters into his shirt. “You always told me that if I drank my milk and ate my vegetables I’d grow up taller than you.”

He smiles and starts to laugh himself. He remembers telling her that, too.

 

…

 

He comes home to Brooklyn with a backpack full of notebooks and a pocket full of caramels. He empties the sweets into a candy dish that he hides behind a pile of books on the windowsill. He says it’s to keep them out of reach of the dogs, but really it’s so he doesn’t have to share. Then he takes the backpack and tosses it into the corner behind the door. He doesn’t think he’ll be needing it any time soon.


End file.
